The Prize

A
LSO BY
J
ILL
B
IALOSKY

F
ICTION

The Life Room

House Under Snow

P
OETRY

The Players

Intruder

Subterranean

The End of Desire

N
ONFICTION

History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life

A
NTHOLOGY

Wanting a Child, edited, with Helen Schulman

Copyright © 2015 Jill Bialosky

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bialosky, Jill.

 
The prize : a novel / Jill Bialosky.

       
pages ; cm

1.
  
Artists--Fiction. 2.
  
Avarice--Fiction. 3.
  
Ethical problems--Fiction.
  
I. Title.

 
PS3552.I19P75 2015

 
813'.54--dc23

2015023052

Cover design by Michael Fusco

Interior design by Megan Jones Design

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10
  
9
  
8
  
7
  
6
  
5
  
4
  
3
  
2
  
1

e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-655-1

For Milton Abraham Bialosky

“For ever panting, and for ever young”

—J
OHN
K
EATS
, “O
DE ON A
G
RECIAN
U
RN
”

“Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.

The rest is the madness of art.”

—H
ENRY
J
AMES
, “T
HE
M
IDDLE
Y
EARS
”

“Art is the window to the interior.”

—H
AROLD
D
ARBY
, “T
HE
U
NREALIZED
S
ELF
”

Contents

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

      
1. CONNECTICUT

      
2. BERLIN

      
3. BERLIN

      
4. NEW YORK

      
5. HAMBURG

      
6. HAMBURG

      
7. NEW YORK

      
8. CONNECTICUT

      
9. NEW YORK

      
10. NEW YORK

      
11. NEW YORK

      
12. CONNECTICUT

      
13. NEW YORK

      
14. NEW YORK

      
15. CONNECTICUT

      
16. NEW YORK

      
17. CONNECTICUT

      
18. CONNECTICUT

      
19. NEW YORK

      
20. CONNECTICUT

PART TWO

      
1. LONDON

      
2. CONNECTICUT

      
3. NEW YORK

      
4. CONNECTICUT

      
5. CONNECTICUT

      
6. CONNECTICUT

      
7. CONNECTICUT

      
8. NEW YORK

      
9. NEW YORK

      
10. CONNECTICUT

      
11. NEW YORK

      
12. NEW YORK

      
13. CONNECTICUT

      
14. NEW YORK

      
15. CONNECTICUT

      
16. CONNECTICUT

      
17. NEW YORK

      
18. NEW YORK

      
19. CONNECTICUT

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE

E
DWARD
D
ARBY KNEW
that an artist's work had the power to change the way in which art was perceived, for every successful artist must recreate the medium, but he did not know, each time he went to a new artist's studio, if he'd ever find it.
When you see a work of art, it will be as if everything else in relationship to it has faded. Art should transport the seer from the ordinary to the sublime.
His father, a scholar of Romantic poetry, told him this when he was a boy. But it was more than that. It was the myths artists created about their art that gave the work authority, and as an art dealer, he was part of that creation. He thought about all this as he looked for Agnes Murray's name on the directory in the vestibule of a crumbling old warehouse in Bushwick. It was a cold and gray morning in April. He hoped he wasn't wasting his time.

He climbed four staircases to her studio. Out of breath, he saw her leaning against the battered door at the end of a dim hall in paint-spattered stretch pants and a moth-eaten cardigan pulled across her chest. She clutched the ends of her sweater. She was pale. Dark circles lined her eyes. She looked as if she hadn't seen another person in months. She thanked him for coming, held out her hand, and brightened, remarking that she liked the work he showed. “I heard you can see into an artist's soul,” she said.

He took her hand, red and chapped, with scratches and cuts, surprisingly tiny for a painter. Something about her earnestness touched him. A slant of light came through her window, and in the brightness she looked different than when she'd greeted him: an Irish beauty with corkscrew curls of red hair held back with a folded bandanna, pea-green eyes, and light freckles peppered on the slope of her nose and upper cheekbones. She was petite but emanated stature.

He traversed the studio, stiff in his blue suit and embarrassed by the squeaking of his new Italian leather shoes. Paintings leaned against the walls and others were stacked on the floor. Paint pots, brushes, and open art books cluttered a worktable. At the farthest end of the studio stood an unmade cot, and on the windowsill, a creaky hotpot and boxes of cereal. A mini-fridge hummed. Unwashed mugs with dried tea bags strung around their handles stood on top. The room smelled of paint, turpentine, and the slight whiff of her odor. Clearly she lived in the studio.

Agnes was a painter with one show under her belt. Leonard Horowitz, her manager who'd arranged this studio visit, warned Edward that at her first solo show at a small gallery on the Bowery, unable to stomach the superficial chatter of the guests who she believed had come for the party rather than for the work, and the tastemakers who, in her words, had their swords out, Agnes spent the opening in the back room nervously chipping her blue fingernail polish. She was high-strung and high-maintenance, an explosive combination.

The first painting she revealed was
Two Boys Holding Hands
. She threw off a white sheet and beamed. It depicted two boys searching in the rubble of 9/11, the eerie ghost remains of the
towers behind them. Wearing pantaloons and ruffled shirts, the boys looked as if they had stepped out of another century. There was, of course, a sense of irony to their dress, to Agnes's clear reference to the great Dutch portrait artists of the seventeenth century, but there was also a solemnity to their expression that cut through that irony, transcended it. Their beautiful and tender faces reminded him of Vermeer's portraits. Though Agnes had painted a vast, sprawling scene, a history painting more in the vein of Rembrandt's
Night Watch
, the faces themselves had an intimacy and quietude that reminded him of Vermeer's portraits of women. Since his student days Edward had been drawn to the old master. He liked that Vermeer didn't try to impose on the world by painting grand scenes. He tried to describe the world as it was in moments of solitude and quiet domesticity.

It was rare that he saw a contemporary artist whose work invited comparisons to the old masters. The art world was insular, and so much of the time no one was looking back more than fifty years. Agnes clearly was.

She walked to the back of the studio where some canvases were stacked and put up a miniature, a study of a girl from the painting. Her head was slightly turned so that her gaze stared back at him. Her hair was pulled back behind a scarf. He looked at it again. The girl, with her tender and wanting eyes, reminded him of his first love, Tess. He hadn't thought of her in years.

The paintings were beautiful with an edge of something darker and deeper. In the juxtaposition of creation and destruction, Agnes brought to life in a personal way the agony of the lives that had been lost when the towers collapsed. He thought it would have been something impossible to catch and yet she had. He was convinced
that this work would define a particular moment in history. No contemporary painter that he knew of had captured it yet.